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When you can't sing.


rofleren

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Wow, I've missed a lot in my absence. This is the most heated I've seen this place.

It's over though, dude. So let's all let it rest, please let's not revive it. I apologize to everyone who I offended, Bob, Guitartrek, you are likely good people with good intentions even if I could not converse with you in a calm and collected manner. I was not as respectful as I could have been.

And yes, Raphaels, in a less heated mood, your joke is quite funny. Better late to say that than never!

So guys, just talking about singing technique, if anyone wants to attempt to make a short video series or a set of suggestions that we can post in the critique section of some very basic singing advice to beginners (like first grade health singing advice, not 10th grade) as this poster was doing

http://themodernvocalist.punbb-hosting.com/viewtopic.php?id=3533

I would have no qualms or complaints with anything else said here. You can discuss your 4th, 5th, or 20th octaves, all you want. I know no one likes to talk about beginner singing techniques, cause they aren't 'cool techniques' or 'where the real technique is at' or whatever, that's why maybe a sticky thread people could point to would work better just to keep people who are singing for the first time or have sung without any voice instructions safer and steered away from attempting advanced stuff too soon. You could even warn people about long term dangers of singing above E4 without a fully functional bridge technique.

I am going to focus on my health, I will no longer debate, derail, nag, or emotionally break down in public, and won't spend much time here, but I no longer feel the need to be banned now that things have settled down and I've calmed down emotionally. I won't stay if people don't want me, I understand I've been a lot of trouble.

If anything positive can come out of this mess, that would be great. I can't sing, so I can't make some basic health videos on breathing/emission and comfortable, safe, beginner singing advice and exercises that might be the difference between injury or not for someone who doesn't know any better. Otherwise, I'd do it myself. I really think if you could sticky something like this for beginners to access it would be incredibly helpful, not for making them professionals (they can get lessons and programs for this), but just for protecting them from all of the other random information here and from themselves.

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I sing Bring him Home too, in the original key, which is one third higher than you do, and I just wish I could get half the intensity and expression you achieve in your interpretation. You grab the listener from the first note, and you hold them. You had the audience in the palm of your hand! And when did they cheer? NOT at some "high note" but at a point where you were SAYING SOMETHING IMPORTANT. They recognized the power of the message. You spoke to them man!

I would say high notes are not important in themselves. They are an absolute - objective places on the scale. What's important is range, which is relative - the range of the song and how you exploit it, which in turn is determined by how your own range relates to it and by your interpretation. I would say, find some more good songs and pitch them lower. There's plenty of precedents for this - you will find loads of classical song books published in 3 versions, High, Middle and Low Voice. There's nothing wrong with it. In this way you can concentrate on the interpretation, comfortable in the knowledge that you will not have to be straining. I bet you would do a fantastically mysterious Music of the Night - you don't need a high Ab when an evocative Eb like you did in Bring Him Home will do very nicely.

The problem I have with singing a song in a lower pitch, is that I often think that the song lose some of its touch. I found this video, which I think is sung VERY VERY good. But then I hear it in the original key, and I almost forget about this, because it can be sung so much more powerful in its original key - I think. But I'll take the challenge, and try to sing Music of the Night in a lower key tomorrow, I'm just afraid it'll be to deep, since it's not a song sung very high in the first place.

And thank you for the compliment! I would like to hear you sing it! It's a good song :)

The technical thing is to have learned how to LET my voice go up through the passaggio rather than pushing it through. That I have learned by taking regular lessons from a teacher who knows what she is doing and knows how to teach it. She follows a method, one that also requires her to continue learning and getting recertified annually so she never stops progressing herself. The method, as it happens, is SLS, which I know from this forum has become somewhat controversial. What is important, I believe, is that it works for me.

When you say that you train SLS, how is it exactly you train then? Like warm-up, exercises and stuff. I'm not that much into SLS. The only thing I can compare SLS with is Brett Manning and I tried his Singing Success without any improvement for some months once.

My first teacher was a classical teacher and, though a great person and singer, who gave me a firm foundation when I started 6 years ago, she just didn't have the technical toolkit that so many of the teachers I read about on this forum have nowadays. Now they really look at the anatomy and physiology, and I changed the way I sang after my very first 30-minute tryout lesson with my SLS teacher! Sorry, I don't mean to preach SLS, my point is not a given method but that finding a teacher who does apply any technical, tried and tested and thought-through method THAT SUITS YOU will help, particularly in negotiating the passaggio, which is very confidence-inspiring. But you do have to stick at it.

The psychological thing I learned is to LISTEN to people when they say you have a good/nice/powerful/interesting/beautiful voice. Because if people don't think you have a good voice they say nothing. They don't say to you they don't like it, they just say nothing about it. It has helped me enormously to hear people say "Nigel, you have a good voice". I don't just dismiss it as a "compliment". I use it as support.

The first such thing I heard was from my first teacher who said I had a nice timbre. My voice was very unstable and not very strong then, and I had lots of problems - all the ones you read about on this forum - but I took that comment and I hugged it to my heart and it buoyed me up through all those times when I doubted I would ever make progress.

So now, even though I can't necessarily hear it myself, and even though there's still tons to learn, and even thought it's still unpredictable, I actually believe I do have a nice voice - so on the days when it's not working right it doesn't matter, because at base it's good. Then when I sing solo I use that knowledge and try to open up and imagine (rightly or wrongly - who cares?!) I'm giving the audience something beautiful. It's a virtuous circle - and lo and behold, people come up afterwards and say thank you and they thought it was good and that reinforces it yet again. I savour it and it supports me through the hard times. Of course, you don't want to be arrogant, but there's no room for false modesty either - it really doesn't help.

[And never write a post on here again entitled "When you can't sing" :mad:]

Hehe, it wasn't meant in that way, more like "the days when you can't sing".

"I don't just dismiss it as a "compliment". I use it as support."

That's a good way of thinking. I usually just think "hey, that was nice, thank you".

But sometimes I use it as support aswell; when I can't sing, I sometimes think "Hey, I did this live. I've recorded a few songs, and I CAN sing. And it CAN be good. And it will get even better!"

Thank you :)

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